They think we grant wishes. If I could grant wishes do you think I would be driving a cab?
She had started to cry, and I felt uncomfortable. I did not know what to do when adults cried. It was something I had only seen twice before in my life: I had seen my grandparents cry, when my aunt had died, in hospital, and I had seen my mother cry. Adults should not weep, I knew. They did not have mothers who would comfort them.
Ragnarok is coming.
He fumbled around with his eyes closed. He groped about, reaching for the comfortable and familiar shaft of his hammer.
Humanity is evil – civilization is the scum that forms on the surface, but beneath, humanity consists of brutes and animals.
No one, then or now, wanted to drink the mead that came out of Odin’s ass. But whenever you hear bad poets declaiming their bad poetry, filled with foolish similes and ugly rhymes, you will know which of the meads they have tasted.
Fat Charlie stared at the sea of unfamiliar faces, their expressions a seething stew of shock, puzzlement, anger and horror; ears burning, he realized the truth. “Er. Sorry. Wrong funeral,” he said. A small boy with big ears and an enormous smile said, proudly, “That was my gramma.
She had a face which was not so much freckled as one big freckle with occasional areas of skin.
The paths that ghosts follow are written on the land in old words. Ghosts don’t take the interstate.
Cats don’t have shoulders, not like people do. But.
I am the keeper of the library, Matthew. Without it I am nothing. Were it to be destroyed again, it would destroy me as well.
He tried to look ashamed and succeeded simply in looking pleased with himself. Odin.
She became certain that there was something in the dark behind her: something very old and very slow. Her heart beat so hard and so loudly she was scared it would burst out of her chest.
Shadow turned, slowly, streaming images of himself as he moved, frozen moments, each him captured in a fraction of a second, every tiny movement lasting for an infinite period. The images that reached his mind made no sense: it was like seeing the world through the multifaceted jewelled eyes of a dragonfly, but each facet saw something completely different, and he was unable to combine the things he was seeing, or thought he was seeing, into a whole that made any sense.
He had only ever seen one episode of it – the one where Coach’s daughter comes to the bar – although he had seen that several times. Shadow had noticed that you only ever catch one episode of shows you don’t watch, over and over, years apart; he thought it must be some kind of cosmic.
Fat Charlie, if someone ever ask if you want to live to be hunnert and four, say no. Everything hurt. Everything. I hurt in places nobody ain’t discover yet.
That is the nature of time. It flows faster when it was younger and the course is narrower: at the end of all things time has spread and slowed, lik oil spilled on a still pond.
You never learn how to write a novel,” he told me. “You only learn to write the novel you’re on.
There are clouds between us and them,” pointed out Isten of the Hungarians. He had a fine black mustache, a large, dusty black hat, and the grin of a man who makes his living selling aluminum siding and new roofs and gutters to senior citizens but who always leaves town the day after the checks clear whether the work is done or not.
They are actors playing parts that are real only for us; they are the masks behind which we see our own faces.